Thursday, May 25, 2017

The Rise of the Alt-Center

In this day and age,
‘dissent’ means little more than feeding mostly vetted, crowd-pleasing
opinions into some online algorithm that will yield better results for a
pharmaceutical giant or a law enforcement agency. We can say all kinds
of shit to a highly selective, built-in audience of multiple selves, and
feel good about exercising our right to free speech – in the meantime
forgetting that all this ‘activism’ is just more content to be harvested like organs for marketing and surveillance purposes.

As data donors, we entrust ourselves to a system that crunches us
into numbers and demographics based on whatever self-serving agenda
needs a conflated mathematical formulae to increase the bottom line of a
corporation and/or the governments they run.

We can wage a “resistance” against the monster we have inadvertently,
but predictably created, having empowered right wing populism as a
means to further disenfranchise the left, which had already abandoned
its economic platform to focus on ‘identity’ and sexuality. How long can
you insist that a fashion faux pas is on par with The Killing Fields in
terms of “appropriation” before your irrelevance becomes well-deserved
fodder for the sub-Reddit community? And who would have guessed that
prioritizing correct pronouns over actual policy to address a widening
and worsening income gap would cause the most struggling and despairing
segment of the voting bloc to throw their lot in with the now
Cheeto-Bag-in-Chief as payback for NAFTA and Lena Dunham?

You could make the argument that the left’s capitulation to identity
politics would be enough to convince the powers that be that they have
eliminated the risk of stirring up the sort of social unrest that
demands a radical overhauling of wealth distribution instead of cosmetic
adjustments to speech. But why settle for an effective neutering of
‘left’ opposition when you can take a chainsaw to the whole damn dog?

For the same reason acquiring the lion’s share of the world’s wealth
isn’t quite the same as ‘having it all’. A mindset that could be best
summed up as “My yacht is only 500 meters longer than an aircraft
carrier because some fucking kid in Detroit still has the luxury of
eating lead and ketchup for breakfast”. Rather than tolerate pesky,
profit-reducing labor unions, universal healthcare, public education and
environmental regulations, why not just replace them all with angry men
yelling at their TV sets? And equally angry women yelling at skinny
models? As a strategy, it seemed to work until, well, . . . Donald
Trump.

Scientifically speaking, an exploding, loose cannon ball of earwax as
leader of the ‘Free World’ is what happens when you successfully kill
off a vital organism – “good” bacteria, if you will, in order to allow
another one to thrive and multiply without impediment. Either by
accident or design, we are helpless against the ruling class as as our
resistance to these ultimately host-killing predators have been eroded
by the absence of a political organism that could create the necessary
bulwarks against their expanding and unchecked powers.

Having purged the elements necessary for a diverse and evenly keeled
political eco-system that provides the checks and balances necessary to
maintain an actual democracy, we are left with a walled-in sectarian
‘Free Trade’ zone where the rights of pipelines and bathroom stalls are
vigorously upheld and protected under a ‘No Smoking’ sign.

The deliberate and ongoing political engineering necessary to give
multinationals their global stranglehold was introduced with predictable
blowback-inducing results in much of the Middle East when left wing
politicians and parties were dissolved at the behest of the US, and
dissenters were driven into mosques, creating the present political
vacuum that gives people in Muslim-majority countries the ‘choice’
between a corrupt neoliberal order enforced by a US installed dictator
or a motley band of head choppers with a more proactive approach to
capitalism.

People in South and Central America have been similarly forced to
cede their sovereignty in exchange for not finding themselves at the
mercy of armed drug dealers on the same payroll as their IS counterparts
in Syria and Iraq.

It was only a matter of time before our overlords would apply the
same divide-and-conquer strategies at home, where the so-called Red/Blue
state divide discourages solidarity between unemployed autoworkers in
the Michigan, and the equally redundant factory and farm workers south
of the Rust Belt. This division is demarcated along ‘color lines’, even
though both demographics are collateral damage left in the wake of
deregulation, privatization and the ruinous trade deals that successive
war party administrations have implemented to increase the bottom line
of their donors.

Our own elite-ascribed ‘tribal’ affiliations result in an endless
televised tug-of-war that pits “rednecks” against “thugs” and
“snowflakes” against everything that isn’t organic, fair trade or
LGBT-friendly for the short-term gains that meaningless victories
engender when “clapping back” on Twitter represents the pinnacle of
dialectical achievement.

The same strategies used to forestall Arab unity and Pan-Africanism
are behind our own failing, upended political system, where both ‘left’
and ‘right’ issue meaningless, social-based ‘fatwas’ against, say,
same-sex marriage and gluten as their corrupt leaders run victory laps
around the boardrooms of Goldman Sachs. And why shouldn’t they rejoice
at their success in synthesizing globalization with a growing strain of a
parasitic brain wasting disease to replace a system whose regulatory
‘glitches’ slowed down its cancerous growth. Enter a murderous
‘healthcare’ bill to hasten the incremental death of surplus labor so
that our smart phones can communicate with our lampshades in the
worker-less, post-Trump utopia ahead.

In the meantime, it’s hardly surprising that a ‘super bug’ would
emerge after three decades of the political and social engineering
necessary to transform left opposition to war into a Red-baiting faction
of warmongers.

What else could explain the liberal establishment agitating on behalf
of the FBI and the CIA, citing “grave concerns” about national security
based on Israeli espionage? Notice how no one is asking why this
particular foreign government is so closely embedded into the American
state security apparatus, despite its refusal to curb its illegal
settlement expansion in the occupied territories. Or why Joe Liebermann,
the Apartheid regime’s biggest booster, is being considered to head the
FBI, with the same bipartisan support his Israeli benefactors receive
from both Republicans and Democrats – most notably the “socialist”
Bernie Sanders – to excuse Israel from adhering to international law.

American liberals are upset, it seems, over their “loose-lipped”
president inadvertently cockblocking an Israeli strike on Iran by
sharing gathered intelligence about impending terrorist attacks with a
G8 member state. Russia’s concern for its own security is just more
evidence of the cunning Putin’s dark designs on the Oval Office where by
sleight-of-hand, a leaking bag of Cheetos has replaced the US
presidency.

You couldn’t make this shit up if you were gacked on ‘Krokodil’ laced
with bath salts and asked to explain current events to a flock of
invisible, face eating seagulls shooting out of the moon. Welcome to
the Meth Lab Matrix, where the Deep State cooks up the
establishment-serving narratives necessary to enlist bipartisan public
support for the coup that will rid the White House of its problematic
resident, and replace his itchy Twitter finger with one more calmly
poised over the nuclear codes.

You could say that the outcome of this symbiotic relationship between outrage producing organisms has resulted in the present political vacuum where liberals revive discredited
cold war tropes to uphold their half of the war machine, while
‘conservatives’ genuflect at the feet of the entity who threatens to
bring it all crashing down. In the absence of a left opposition, we are
stuck with an ‘Alt-Center’, where
social justice warriors, goaded on by the state propaganda organ known
as ‘Comedy Central’, lob cruise missiles both figuratively and literally
at domestic and overseas targets they deem not in line with the
objectives of a sensitivity-training seminar. In the meantime, their
Republican cohorts get down to the actual work of dismantling the last
remaining obstacles to their planetary host-devouring objectives.